Life after death? Neurosurgeon says he took an outer body trip during his coma

AFP, WASHINGTON

Eban Alexander’s quick trip to heaven started with a headache.

It was November 2008 and a rare bacterial meningitis was fast on its way to shutting down the University of Virginia neurosurgeon’s neocortex — the part of the brain that deals with sensory perception and conscious thought.

“For seven days, I lay in a deep coma,” he said.

Yet at the same time, Alexander “journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe, a dimension I’d never dreamed existed.”

There he found “big, puffy, pink-white” clouds against a “deep, black-blue sky” and “flocks of transparent, shimmering beings ... quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet.”

It turns out Alexander was not alone.

His traveling partner in the afterlife was a young woman with high cheekbones, deep blue eyes and “golden brown tresses” who, amid “millions” of butterflies, spoke to him “without using any words.”

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever,” she told the doctor, a father of two with movie star looks. “You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.”

NEW BOOK

Alexander recounts his story, and seeks to explain it, in Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, to be published in the US on Oct. 23.

His New York publisher failed to respond to interview requests, but an excerpt from Proof of Heaven in Newsweek magazine has stirred the enduring debate about life after death.

Inevitably, skeptics wonder if Alexander, who teaches at Harvard Medical School, is going out on a paranormal limb.

“It sounds like he had nothing more than an intense lucid dream,” wrote one reader on Newsweek’s Web site.

“A personal anecdote is not evidence or proof, as moving as it may be,” another added.

The sarcastic New York blog Gawker challenged its readers to spot the difference, if any, between Alexander’s portrayal of paradise with published accounts of LSD trips.

SUPPORTERS

However, others stood firmly by Alexander, who has previously spoken of his near-death experience on science television programs and in a lengthy interview last year with Skeptico.com, a science and spirituality blog.

“If there is evidence and proof of an afterlife, this is probably as good as it gets,” Catholic Online, a Web-based Roman Catholic news service, wrote approvingly.

By one estimate, 3 percent of Americans — more than 9 million — have undergone a near-death experience. Some have written up their stories on the Web site of the Near Death Experience Research Foundation.

“There are tens of thousands of near-death experiences every year and many of them are very similar to Alexander’s,” said Paul Perry, co-author of several best-selling books on the topic.

“These experiences might be a glimpse into our next miraculous and exciting adventure,” he told reporters in an e-mail. “Unfortunately, there is little meaningful research taking place in this field right now.”

Dean Mobbs, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York who studies neurobiology and fear in humans, did not dismiss Alexander’s experience — but he questioned how it came about.

“I think there’s no paranormal component to it,” said Mobbs, co-author of a paper in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences identifying near-death experiences as “the manifestation of normal brain functions gone awry.”

“I believe our brains can concoct vivid experiences particularly in situations of confusion and trauma,” he said in an interview. “The brain is trying to reinterpret the world and what’s going on.”